Anthony Luciano, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for The TharpeRobbins Company (http://www.tharperobbins.com), joins us as we explore Converging Trends Driving Your Workforce Strategies and how to use them to create and advantage... Read the Transcript

Anthony Luciano Senior VP of Sales & Marketing The TharpeRobbins Company, Inc.  http://tharperobbins.com

Anthony is a global leader in the managed recognition and rewards industry.  Marketing initiatives have included launching several new reward and recognition programs: The Motiv8 Performance Platform, The Masterpiece Collection and The Evolution Campaign. Prior to joining TharpeRobbins, Anthony served as the national sales director for the Michael C. Fina Company, was a regional sales manager for Locus Communications, a corporate account manager for NEXTEL Communications and a national account manager for Lucent Technologies.

In this article, we explore how talent and workforce trends are all driving to the idea of recognizing talent as individual. Many organizations are creating strategic talent acquisition and retention plans that favor the employee as an individual. Take a look at your workforce at this moment and decide how you make them a special part of the business... you are not going to treat them like a number and expect to keep them.  Developing a program of opportunity specially designed for them is tricky if companies try to do it in-house. Companies can also create their own certifications for specific skills. Although these are not portable if an employee leaves, it satisfies that need for an individualized educational experience. General bonus structures typically receive neutral reactions and the pat on the back to a group of employees for a fine job just doesn’t cut it anymore. Points-based systems provide customized rewards systems for individuals and allows employers to show some level of scalability. Freelancers are the ultimate individual employee and are accelerating the trend towards individualization even among your traditional employees. In the next two years we see two directions for this mega trend. First, successful companies will introduce individualized incentive, benefit, and work plans that speak to the employee as an individual. Degrees and certifications remain the big driver of educational need, but we will see more of executive teams trying to internally develop their own staff through position training. The other track involves the growing small business market. Freelancers and small businesses may become the majority of work styles in the world. Again, given the individualized nature of many workers that have recently entered the workforce it makes sense that they would work for themselves. To turn these converging trends into an advantage, consider the following. Talent and workforce trends are converging on the individual. The most effective incentives, training and promotion are individualized. Individualized talent strategies can scale for large companies. The era of individual talent is here to stay as employee and as freelancer. And speaking of freelancers, freelancers make individualized talent strategies easy.